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MillimeterCompressed DI
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
O Entertainment of San Clemente, Calif., recently created a new iteration of the project formerly known as Santa Claus Versus the Snowman using Adobe Premiere Pro and a beta version of CineForm's Prospect 2K software. The project started out as a 1998 CG special on ABC, and then became an IMAX release in 2002. This time, O Entertainment created a 15-minute version of the film, now called Santa's Polar Blast, at 2k resolution for use in upcoming theme park and ride film venues.
A scene from Santa’s Polar Blast as seen by artists at O Entertainment through its Prospect 2K/Premiere Pro editing interface.
According to Lance Bachelder, supervising editor at O Entertainment, the company performed a compressed digital intermediate on the original, fully animated, 3D (right eye/left eye) Targa files at 2048×1500 resolution using Boxx Dual AMD Opteron processor machines and Premiere Pro in conjunction with an early version of CineForm Prospect 2K. The previous version of CineForm's software — Cineform Prospect HD — was used to perform the HD-resolution DI work on the independent film Dust to Glory.
“We tapped into the original 2k Targa files [created in LightWave],” Bachelder explains. “Using this method, we were able to cut them all in realtime, rather than down-rezzing the files and going offline and cutting the movie and then re-conforming the frames. Instead, we were able to convert the files from Targas into 2k CineForm files and cut the whole thing in realtime. This way, we did not have to put an additional 2TB or more of storage into our network, which would have cost significant money. With the CineForm product, we were able to use a standard RAID array to cut and finish the entire show.”
CineForm's CTO David Newman wrote a special utility script to solve what could have been a major problem: converting the original 2k 8-bit Targa files to 10-bit 4:2:2 CineForm 2K AVI files. “That was huge,” Bachelder says. “I think this has a lot of applications for DIs and for creating manageable archival material out of any project in a cost-effective way.”
